Mystery: Suspense: The Lazarus Phenomenon: : A Private Investigator Mystery Crime Thriller: (horror, thriller, science fiction, mystery, police, murder, ... (Marie Avalon Mystery Crime Series Book 1) (3 page)

He felt like bawling. He could technically get by with it too. After all, he was supposed to be dead and there wasn’t anybody around for God only knew how far. He could just tune up like a little girl if he wanted to. Far too macho to sob like a baby, even in secret, he swiped at the tears that were slipping free nonetheless. 

“Gah! Okay! What the heck is happening?!” 

He shook his head and tried to focus. On something other than the chainsaw massacre brain ache he was experiencing between either of his temples. His fingers knotted his hair in supreme frustration and he plucked two large clumps of it free from the roots. 

“Think, brainless!” He growled and kicked the wall of the hollow tree.  

The fish bowl chime echoed three consecutive times. Blue light cascaded his face. It registered at last that it was coming from the phone. 

Squinting, he read the tiny print.

“Calm down, pal. The Doc and Papa Vierra hired a private detective. She’s smoking hot and seems to have her ducks in line. I honestly think she’ll be able to help you. Not just saying it to keep you from freaking.”

 From what had to be lightyears away, Alex calmed the storm in him. He felt his lips twist in a tiny smirk. His fingers moved faster than his thought processes to type his reply.

“Totally calm over here. For a Zombie that’s standard procedure anyway. I’m chilling in the tree fort. Tell the Gramps to put some pedal into it!”

He jabbed the “Send” button with a trembling finger and sagged into the leaves. It might actually be okay. 

That notion left him instantly. He felt the slobber hit the side of his face before he heard the gurgling growl. 

Nick sprung up into a spider monkey’s fight stance. His hair was standing on end, all up the back of his skull and the nape of his neck. He even felt the five o’clock shadow forming around his lips prickle and scrape his nostrils.

“Okay, for real, Nicolas. Think of something!” 

He was drawing nothing but blanks. Unfortunate. The dog lunged forward and bit into his shoulder. Nick screamed and tried to tear free of the dog. He leaned up and sunk his teeth desperately into its neck, thinking that would hurt it enough to free him. His bite wasn’t strong enough to pierce the bulldog’s hide.

“Look what I’ve got, boys! Bourbon! Release, boy!”

The dog’s teeth came free of Nick’s bones. The kid sprawled on the ground in a daze. With one hand, he tried to massage the dog bite, with the other he jabbed a finger at the figure who towered over him. 

“It’s fuzzy, but I know you from somewhere. Somewhere like school maybe or Santa Bianca’s…Or both.”

He didn’t get the chance to place this mystery re-acquaintance. The butt of a rifle collided with his forehead. Darkness took him again. 

* * *

“He’s not answering his phone!” Alex was in a panic. It had only been 10 minutes, but 10 minutes is 10,000 years when you’re talking to a loved one that died recently. 

“Maybe he’s just scared. You said we were almost to the old tree fort anyway, right?” Renee tried to keep her voice hopeful. 

“He’s gone.” Marilyn’s blood had gone cold as she uttered the words. 

“What?” Alex looked crestfallen. 

Marilyn pointed to the muddy tracks leading away. 

“The leaves are too crushed for this time of the year. The wildlife doesn’t venture too far from their dens when it gets this cold. Besides nothing leaves a print with grooves in it. Those are mud tires. Some off-road dually truck pulled through here less than an hour ago.” 

Marilyn strayed farther into the thicket. 

“Look! There are dog prints too! A shoe print there, size 10. Nicky wears a 10 didn’t you say?”

She followed the trail to the hollowed tree Alex had described.

“God, please…Not again.” Renee’s voice trembled in the air. 

Alex sank to his knees and crawled forward on his hands. There in the mud and wet leaves lay a cheap burner cell with a huge hole knocked in the text screen. It had been crushed in the obvious struggle.

“Not just gone. He’s been taken.” Marilyn clarified. Alex bit down on the back of his fist again, head bobbing in panic. 

“Taken? Where?” Renee went green around the lips. 

Marilyn looked up to the body of the tree. There was a scrap of white paper pinned to it with a box cutter. Two words were scribbled across it. 

“He’s yours.”

Marilyn blanched. She teetered on her heels and grabbed the tree. Clenched her mouth in her fist and uttered a tiny wheezing sob. 

“Yeah, okay. The name makes sense now. This just got personal!” She fanned herself with her hands. 

“Do not pass out!” She commanded herself in her head until those four words became a mantra. 

This very scenario had haunted her for years. It was a nightmare come at last to life.

“What? What’s it say? What does it mean, Marilyn?” 

Renee snatched the paper from Marilyn and read it aloud.

“He’s yours?” she asked and then her eyes lit up. 

“Nicolas Avalon…Marilyn Avalon. Weird name.  Not many people share it?” Renee looked at Alex, eyes popping. 

Alex shook his head, not following. 

“I had a baby out of wedlock when I was a younger woman. I was seeing a guy…We were just fooling around with each other. Didn’t know he was married. When I found out about his wife who had just realized she was pregnant I ended it immediately. Wasn’t fast enough apparently. A week later I realized that I was pregnant too. I ended their marriage, not even meaning to. By the time I delivered, I was too horrified by everything that had happened so I gave the baby up…” Marilyn clutched at her stomach and chewed her lip.

“So…that means that Nicky?” Renee’s eyes went wide. 

“Nicky is my son!” Marilyn sobbed. 

Nick woke up in the woods. 

He breathed heavily out of his nose and tried to move. 

That’s when he realized that his ankles were chained. To concrete blocks. 

“Nicolas. It’s foolish to attempt to run. How many times do we have to go over this? You live and we monitor. You die and we take notes. You wake up and we start all over. Capisce? ”

He held his breath and closed his eyes. It was rushing back now a mile a minute. He couldn’t deal with this, but he really had no choice. Ready or not, it was happening now. 

First things first. He needed to figure out where he was.

Twisting around on himself, he felt chains shaken by his legs and something heavy under his feet. Concrete blocks. 

“Listen, alright! I get that this is important. Might change the fate of Humanity. I didn’t sign up for this!”

There was a revving sound. A truck. 

Nicky realized too quickly that he was connected by several chains to a truck. Which one of his captors had just thrown into neutral and was letting slide for Lake Nighthorse.

“Ah-oh, God!”        

“You can’t panic. Not now. Wanna stay alive? Think, brainless!” 

It was truly unfortunate how he was drawing total blanks. 

* * *

Marilyn clutched the note in a quaking hand. She paced Santa Bianca’s living room floor. 

“They knew he was my child, but I never told anyone about him. Not even my closest friends ever knew I was pregnant. I isolated myself from the whole world while I carried Nicolas. There was only one person that I ever told the secret and it was only because I felt it was the right thing to do. This can only mean one thing.” 

Renee raised her brows, trying to follow. Marilyn threw her hands in the air. 

“It means they knew his father! He’s the only one I ever told! Stay tracking with me.”

“Alright, so who was Nicky’s father?” Renee swallowed, reluctant to pick this scab. 

Marilyn rolled her eyes and laughed. 

“That trashy cowboy’s name was Army Prescott. He had a prominent career in the 101st Airborne. I’ve always been a sucker for a man in uniform.”

Alex sat up from where he slouched against the couch. He looked like someone had just electrocuted him. 

“What’s the matter, kid? You know something I don’t?” Marilyn’s eyes went wide. 

“Wait a sec. Your name is Prescott, isn’t it?”

Alex licked his lips. 

“My dad’s real name is Alexander Prescott. They don’t call me Junior. It’s just Alex because they’ve always called my dad Army. He- He won like a boat-load of Medals when he was in the 101st. He’s even been interviewed on Good Morning, America a few times.” Alex was shaking his head. His lips had turned purple. 

“But my dad had a pretty nasty secret. He cheated on my mom a lot. She had been begging him for a baby. He didn’t really want one. Just wanted her to shut up, I guess. 

Mom told me the story something like this. There was a public service lady that Dad had wiled and charmed to( her words not mine) ‘get in her pants’. This was what ended my Mom and Dad’s marriage. She found out I was coming the same week she found out about the affair. She died of cancer when I was 12. I moved through the system a lot and finally got invited to live here in Santa Bianca’s. It’s like a charity or something so they take kids from all over…” His voice trailed off. 

Marilyn sank into an armchair, stupefied. 

“Nicky is your brother. You’re almost exactly the same age because you have different mothers. Your father was a famous service member, which makes you something of a public figure just by association. You both made your way to a unique foster home that accepts children from all over the country because it’s a charity…” She looked up at Renee who was looking at Alex in concern. 

“Okay, so hang on here! This is all just spiraling a little bit out of the Universe for me!”Alex held up his hand.  

His horror was perfectly founded. The boy he’d grown up with in foster care had suddenly died and left him alone, twisting in the winds of turbulent youth. Now he had resurrected and reappeared as his biological brother. The obvious victim of a demented murder scheme. It would be too much for anyone to take in right off.

“If the guys that took Nick knew that he was your kid, then they’d have to have learned that from my dad. Which means that my dad is in on whatever seriously warped thing it is that they are doing to Nick, right?” Alex sputtered and clutched at his knees to hide that they were trembling. 

Marilyn nodded. 

“Yes, that’s the only logical explanation.” 

Alex opened his mouth to say something, but the words never came out. 

“Guys!” Renee interrupted. Her eyes were glued to the room’s ancient TV set. 

It was trained to the local news. 

“I’m Erin Pickler. We’re live here at Lake Nighthorse where local fishermen allegedly witnessed a 17-year-old Caucasian male being dragged into the water chained to the bumper of an unmanned truck. What makes this account of eye-witness murder even more harrowing? The 17-year-old is being identified by police as Nicolas Avalon. The victim of the infamous Main Street vehicular homicide 7 months ago.”  

Marilyn leaped to her feet. The truck was bobbing about in the water like an apple. Police and firefighters were combing the lake with machinery. Would they find young Nicolas’ body? 

Durango was stricken with an epidemic of psychological insomnia from the image that appeared next. There were splashes and bubbles around the nose of the truck. A firefighter shouted and pointed at the water. Several people crowded close to the shore. 

Suddenly, Nick’s head cleared the surface of the water gasping for breath. His hair was clinging to his face and he spluttered. His eyes were wide with terror.

“I cut him from the crash! I took his body from the crash!” One of the firefighters was screaming hysterically and pointing at the boy. 

Hysteria seems to spread infectiously. The boy made a bolt for it, swimming into the deeper water at a break-neck clip. 

The camera lingered in his wake as though it had been abandoned.

Marilyn, Renee, and Alex exchanged glances. 

He jerked. It felt like he had been asleep for centuries. The frigid water jarred him to the bones. All of his muscles were pulled by the force of his thrashing into wakefulness. He could feel them tearing. 

His eyes came open underwater. Blurry, greenish gray, dead worms floating about his head. Lake water. 

He couldn’t remember anything. Yet somehow this situation felt all too familiar. Larger than life.

His head cleared the surface. He gasped for breath out of reflex. The late afternoon light pierced into his panic-stricken mind. It was the only thing he could focus on for a split second. Light. Too much. Toxic to the delicate balance of his quaking world.  

Then there were people screaming. Why were they screaming?

He felt his head spin around. He was in the middle of a lake. There were firefighters, police officers, and local news crews along the shore. Some of them were transfixed in silent terror. Some of them were pointing and screaming random things. 

“I cut him from the crash! He-I’d know that face anywhere!” One of the firefighter’s had collapsed to his knees in unholy terror. 

Nicky bolted from an instinctual reaction. They were the predators he was the prey, so far as he was concerned. This Frankenstein’s monster life was new and threatened. He had to make tracks and fast.

It was an auditory hallucination. Hysteric en-route, Nicky didn’t know that. He could hear their voices in his mind. The people that had done this to him. 

“Hyperkalemia, Nicolas. It means too much potassium in the blood. You know the nutrient in bananas.  For most people it’s a disease. It causes irregularities in heart rhythms. You remember, we’ve talked about it, that’s what we call arrhythmia. You and your family, however, seem to have a highly unique irregularity in your gene pool. You appear to have scheduled hyperkalemia. It’s almost like clockwork, but your blood seems to trigger bouts of the imbalance at sporadic intervals, as though it were making an excess to use for some purpose...”

Nick tried to block the voice out. It was impossible to stuff his ears when he was treading water. He could do nothing but grit his teeth and listen to this schizophrenic monolog. 

“Nicolas! There’s something else! It’s stunning. At the same time your blood produces the excess potassium your adrenal glands seem to enlarge on their own. They produce benign tumors like clockwork that seem to absorb this excess potassium for some reason! Do you know what this means?”